Avalanche: Heretical Reflections on the Dark and the Light

Joy, W. Brugh

I tried to abstract this book succinctly yet do justice to it, and I wrote 2¼ pages. That old abstract is being incorporated into a review of the book in EHE News. Here I will simply say that whereas Joy’s first book, Joy’s Way, gave us the first half of his EHE autobiography, this is the second, "darker" half (which also ends in light). Joy is a physician and spiritual teacher. Avalanche could serve as a handbook on how to respond to the EHEs life gives us, and how to create the conditions for experiencing them deeper and/or higher, and as needed. In his own path, he describes mystical, psychic, and healing experiences, transformative dreams, OBEs, and multiple selves. He presents ways of integrating them and living from them, weaving a paradigm for the future. Although not deliberate, one offshoot of his approach is that the experiences themselves are validated. This book emphasizes the dark, negative side of some EHEs, and Joy shows how to respond to them so that their energy can promote meaningful transformation—at both the individual and collective levels. If you read one book a year, let it be this.